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There on the cover of our little local newspaper was a picture of 76 year-old Gabriele Silten.
She grew up in Holland. Today she is Professor Emerita of European Languages at Pasadena City College. It reminded me how fortunate I was to receive an opportunity through the American Field Service to visit the Netherlands for a summer following my sophomore year in high school.
Ms. Silten and I stood on the same ground forty years apart under very different circumstances. Let me start at the beginning. I arrived in the Netherlands as a naïve American teen looking to broaden my world view. I had never traveled outside the United States. I was fascinated by art and soaked up all of the great Dutch masters in the Amsterdam museums. I lived with a family on a farm in Zuidbroek, a very small community in the north, and I watched as they tended huge greenhouses filled with the most beautiful plants and flowers you can imagine. There were four children in the family and they were very good about taking me to see and experience their country. I may have even been to a disco or two which is what they call a nightclub.
One day, we took a long bicycle tour. I remember it well. The land was flat and we passed miles of tulip fields occasionally stopping to see a windmill. The serenity on this clear, warm day was striking. But I also remember feeling tired and sore as the day wore on. I was not used to riding such long distances by bike and I was becoming thirsty and hungry as a blister developed on my heel from rubbing on my shiny white K-Swiss shoes (those shoes were so cool). I thought to myself, this ride is becoming torture.
Just then, we rode our bikes through a place in Northern Holland called Westerbork. I saw a set of rusty old railroad tracks there that had been cut and bent up toward the sky. There was a sign next to the tracks but I couldn’t read it. I stopped for a moment.
Upon further inspection, I noticed a sort of tower behind the tracks and a fence of barbed wire and some bricks arranged in a sculpted pattern on the ground. That’s odd, I thought. I got off my bike and walked closer. The bricks had stars of David on them.
I suddenly turned cold and felt my flesh crawl. The serenity I had felt among the tulips was met with dread. The bricks multiplied as my eyes got bigger. Suddenly I noticed thousands of them.
I found myself frozen in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp. I should mention that I am an American Jew although I most closely fit the term “assimilated” meaning that I studied Judaism as a child and had a bar mitzvah, but by age 16, I had stopped attending temple. I was not interested in observing organized religion. My spirituality at that moment was unimportant. I was focused myopically on my heritage. Culturally, I am always going to be a Jew and the land I was standing on is where many people died for that very same reason. In fact, my own grandfather almost died in World War II when he was shot by Nazis trying to cross the border from France to Germany with the U.S. Army. He was only 400 miles from Westerbork.
A wave of sadness and guilt fell over me: sadness because of the senseless deaths that had taken place on the ground on which I stood; guilt for thinking even for a moment that my thirst or hunger or pain on that bike ride was torture. What did I know about pain or hunger? What did I know about torture?
In Westerbork, there is a small memorial center that documents the history of the camp. I learned that Anne Frank and her family were sent to Westerbork on August 8, 1944 and deported to Auschwitz a month later. Many more names were unfamiliar to me, but they accompanied pictures of real people in real pain with only glimpses of hope and happiness.
Westerbork was a transit camp. It was developed to hold Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and resistance fighters. From this location, its victims were loaded on cattle cars and transported to other camps. At the far end of the memorial center is a rusted metal sign indicating the transport to Auschwitz.
I took a close look and saw scratch marks that I later imagined were patterned as if an inmate had literally been pulled off the sign clawing it in vain with his fingernails as he may have been loaded onto a boxcar. I felt my stomach drop. From 1942 to 1945, a total of 107,000 people passed through the camp on 93 outgoing trains. Only 5,200 of them survived. The death rate was hundreds per day.
Flash forward to February 24, 2010 when I discovered Gabriele Silten’s story and then researched her online at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Gabriele was the only child of Jewish parents living in the German capital of Berlin. Her grandfather owned a pharmacy and a pharmaceuticals factory, where Gabriele's father also made his living.
In 1938 the Nazis forced her grandfather to sell his businesses for very little money to an "Aryan" German. After that, her father decided they should move to Amsterdam where it was safer for Jews. Her grandfather stayed behind. In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. At just seven years of age, Gabriele was frightened by the German troops marching into the city. When she went to school she had to wear a yellow Jewish star, and she couldn't play with her Christian friends anymore.
She and her family chose not to go into hiding, but three years later Nazi soldiers went house to house rounding up the Jews. On that day, a Sunday, Gabriele’s family was arrested (by now she was age ten).
They were taken to a main square in Amsterdam and then to the Central train station where the cattle cars were waiting. They were loaded into the cattle cars by the masses and the train left for Westerbork.
At Westerbork, her parents and grandmother went through a registration process and then a medical examination. Then they went to the barracks to which they had been assigned; theirs was number 65. The barracks were very long buildings made of wood. Since they had been built in a hurry, they were ill constructed with doors and windows that didn't fit and holes where the rain, wind and dust would come in. On either side of the entrance to the barracks was a huge room, one for the men and the other for the women. Each held approximately 300 people. The beds were stacked three-high as bunkbeds, with strawsacks for mattresses and pillows. There were no sheets and only those who brought their own blankets had them.
Westerbork was overcrowded, so Gabriele shared a bunk with her mother and her grandmother in the middle "layer" of stacks. At the end of each room was a washroom, again one for the men and the other for the women. It held one long sink and had one toilet (remember this is for 300 people). There were no walls, partitions, sheets, etc. to maintain privacy. Anything and everything one did was out in public. There was no place to hang or store what few possessions they had; everything had to be kept on or in the bed. The mattresses and pillows were inhabited by fleas, flies, lice and other vermin. Since it was impossible to keep out dust and dirt, any time one scratched open a bug bite, infection resulted. There were inmate doctors and nurses, but few had any medications, so it was difficult to heal people.
The barracks housed inmates from all walks of life and all degrees of religious observance. Some inmates were orthodox; many practiced variations of observance; and yet others were totally assimilated Jews, as were Gabriele’s family. The differences between people gave rise to a number of quarrels and fights. A common source of strife was theft. Some people did desperate things in desperate times to stay alive. There was also no common ground about hygiene. Some people washed often and others not at all.
Adults were expected to work. Gabriele’s father, a pharmacist by profession, worked in the "metal industry" at the camp, which meant he had to flatten big metal sewer pipes with a hammer. Her mother, by profession a commercial photographer, was assigned to be a "kindergarten teacher" in the camp, but there were no learning materials or lesson plans. Many children regressed and began soiling their pants again, as well as their beds. The fact that many of them had diarrhea made conditions worse. They were given wooden shoes to wear when they arrived, which were hard on their feet and chafed open spots on their heels and insteps. When the children soiled themselves, these chafe wounds got dirty, then got infected and the children fell ill - more so than they already were.
Food was brought to the barracks, on a special small cart, pulled by inmates. The cart contained a large vat of soup, called potato soup, which Gabriele described visually as used dishwater. It had no taste and - probably - few calories. They also received bread rations, usually for 3 days at a time, with a bit of fat stuck on top. “I have no idea what the fat was,” Gabriele confesses. “I’m probably better off not knowing.”
There were no books or toys and the children mostly just tried to stay out of everyone's way. There was a small "playground" with a sand box, a swing, and a teeter-totter. But the sand in the sand box was polluted since the children soiled their pants in it and there was no one to clean it up or to put new sand in. It became unusable and unhealthy.
On Tuesday nights a list was published with names of those who would go on transport (to Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and other camps). If your name appeared on the list, you went immediately the next morning. One night Gabriele’s grandmother saw her name on the list and she decided to kill herself rather than go to another camp. She committed suicide in July 1943. Only months prior, Gabriele’s grandfather was arrested back in Berlin and threatened with deportation. He, too, committed suicide rather than face his executioners.
Gabriele and her parents stayed in Westerbork until January 1944 when they were further deported to Theresienstadt (a.k.a. Terezin). Twelve-year-old Gabriele and her parents were liberated from Terezin sixteen months later in May 1945. That June, the Silten family returned to Amsterdam. In total they spent two long years in the camps and experienced horror we cannot imagine.
When I visited the Netherlands as an impressionable sixteen year-old and when I look back again now as an adult I am struck by how hard it is to humanize the tragedy of war, and hatred, and genocide. We study the numbers, the events, the victories and the losses, but none of that seems to keep us focused on what is really important – each and every person. We must value life. We must value humankind. We must never forget those we lost and how it happened so we never repeat the near extinction of an entire people. One of the lessons, as Gabriele defines it, is that “sometimes there is a disconnect between what we’re learning in the classroom and what actually happened.”
My children are likely the last generation to benefit from meeting a holocaust survivor. The youngest survivors with living memory of the camps are now in their seventies. I tell my kids never to be too thirsty, or too hungry, or too sore to stop their bike and listen – to hear the echoes of the past as I once did in the Netherlands and to fight for peace and human rights whenever possible.
Stories like Gabriele’s make me feel so privileged to live the life I was given, and with privilege comes great responsibility. Each of us owe it to ourselves and to all people who suffer to be active defenders and proponents of peace. The 1994 Rwandan genocide and the current crisis in Darfur teach us that genocide still exists today and people need our help. We must never forget.
